HP bugged its PR man

The answer is the finger always points to the PR man or woman, instantly suspected of leaking stuff to hacks worldwide - although as we know and they will attest, they are often the last to know everything. Or even anything.

So too with paranoid firm Hewlett Packard, which redefined ethics by not only bugging directors' and employees' phones, but also jobbing hacks.

The latest revelation is that the paranoid firm assumed the leaker was a PR, an ex-hack called Michael Moeller, and set the dogs on him. HP has now apologised to him, it seems. That is a first. No one apologises to PRs.

PRs are the lightning rods who often catch high voltage when it's sparking from a high level in a firm. But in our experience PRs rarely leak because they know, better than most, they are vulnerable to being blamed. You can even get them drunker than a skunk, and their protective interests overrule the loss of control they otherwise suffer.

While Andy Grove is credited for saying "only the paranoid survive", we doubt he meant clinical paranoia, which often goes with delusions of grandeur.

In other HP news, this time history, news.com talks of Carleton Fiorina, and her forthcoming Penguin tome. Speaking at a conference, Winsome Carly said she was accused of installing a pink marble bath at HP and suffered because she sometimes flew on a corporate jet.

The web site reports her as saying it was used as proof that she thought she was regal, "that's code for bitch". Well, we don't know what Her Brittanic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who has knighted Americans Lou Gerstner and Bill Gates, would think of that innuendo, God bless Her.

We reported here that it was her acolytes who described her as more important than the King of Spain. She never laid claim to royalty. That wouldn't be the American way. µ